Much has been written about the Icknield Way by antiquaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Most of them regarded the road as one of the four royal roads or Roman roads of Britain, on the authority not of local evidence and direct examination, but of half-mythic laws and histories. The earliest of these are “The Laws of Edward the Confessor.” Here four roads are mentioned--Watlinge strete, Fosse, Hikenilde strete, and Erminge strete--two of them extending across the breadth of the land and two throughout the length; and travellers on them were protected by the king’s peace. But Liebermann assigns as a probable date to these laws a year between 1130 and 1135: Pollock and Maitland, in their _History of English Law_, condemn the work as a compilation of the last years of Henry I; having something of the nature of a political pamphlet and being adorned with pious legends, “its statements, when not supported by other evidence, will hardly tell us more than that sane men of the twelfth century would have liked these statements to be true.” The French version of the “Laws of William the Conqueror” is almost word for word the same as the Laws of the Confessor in the matter of the royal roads: the Latin version omits Hykenild strete. Roger de Hoveden, in 1200, uses almost the same words: so does Henry of Huntingdon in 1130, except that he describes the Icknield Way as going out of the east into the west. Mr. Harold Peake suggests to me that these writers may all have had as their inspiration the brilliant Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the _History of the British Kings_ in the early twelfth century. He tells us, in language not more credible than that of “The Dream of Maxen” in the _Mabinogion_, that King Belinus commanded four roads to be made over the length and breadth of the island:--